Suddenness is one of the most painful things about grief. But over time, grief spreads its tendrils with a perverse consistency, creating moments of misery which grow over days, months and years – sometimes lasting for a lifetime.In Neeraj Ghaywan’s Homebound (2025) – India’s official entry to the Oscars – grief is not sudden, it’s inevitable and presented in a brutal, matter-of-factly manner, but without any trace of exaggeration.The sight of a young man, carrying his sick friend over his shoulder and walking across a scorching, deserted road at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic is jarring, to say the least.The sound of sharp, pensive breaths of audience members sitting around me inside the movie theatre reflected the impact that the film about the friendship and aspirations of two young men – one Dalit, the other a Muslim – had on us, the more fortunate people who had the privilege of introspecting about the duo’s fate from a distance, and not sharing it.It was a rare acknowledgement of the grief of less-fortunate people whom we chose to ignore, comfortably ensconced in the fortification of our social and economic privilege.Ten years ago, in Ghaywan’s Masaan (2015), the line “Ye dukh khatam kaahe nahi hota be? (why does this grief not end?)” was a searing outtake on the sense of loss, spoken by one of the protagonists as a fierce, helpless expression of pain after the sudden loss of a loved one.A decade later, Homebound adds an apt refrain to that sense of collective bereavement which we saw in Masaan.The backdrop had changed, with the mechanised rolling of dying machines inside Surat’s garment factories seen in Homebound replacing Masaan’s dancing embers and sound of burning flesh at the cremation ghats of Varanasi, where the company of death is as certain as the Ganga’s high tides and ebbs.And yet, a common string tied the characters from the two films – the almost insurmountable wall of the grief of proverbial ordinary people.Ghaywan’s filmmaking excels in the simplicity of his characters, people whom we see everyday and forget; or worse, humiliate by choosing to not notice, leaving them to stay in the periphery.Dalit labourers working on brick kilns, the tired government job aspirant sitting near the toilet of a train’s general compartment, or the nondescript, silent peon who changes the water bottles on top of office desks every few hours are all part of our worlds, and still, they somehow fall short of registering their presence in our minds, our attention clouded with a heady mix of privilege and non-existent empathy.The casual, everyday Islamophobia which gets a fresh lease of life during India-Pakistan cricket matches, unaffordable cost of private healthcare, corruption of small-town policemen or the diatribe of the privileged against reservation – there is barely anything exaggerated about the scenarios depicted in Ghaywan’s films.In fact, we live in a world where lynchings of Muslims, atrocities against Dalit people and hate speech have come to be so normalised that their chances of being extensively covered by the mainstream media depend on the magnitude of the gruesomeness of the crime.The tales of discrimination which we see in Masaan or Homebound are the tip of the iceberg. There is no drama in the portrayals. The same can be said about the imagery that Ghaywan uses while reminding us about the COVID-19 pandemic.Be it the sight of policemen swinging their lathis at helpless labourers, the long queues of migrants walking over empty highways with their suitcases and children in tow, or young lives being abruptly snuffed out by the disease, none of the visuals should come as a shocker to us.These events which inextricably became part of our lives, are reminiscent of the times when the vulnerable and marginalised sections of the society were left to bear the full wrath of the pandemic. Thus, what we see in Homebound has already occurred, and we conveniently choose to no longer talk about these incidents, our attention shifting to new reels, memes and social media trends.We have seen and forgotten things which were as painful as the sight of a young Muslim boy crying for his Dalit friend who, in a fever-induced delirium hallucinates about curing the blisters on the feet of his labourer mother, a result of toiling barefoot for hours.Back in 2020, we could easily bury the outrage over a running train crushing a group of migrants trying to return to their home by joining the clamour of TV channels conducting debates on ‘Corona Jihad’ and the enthusiastic crowd in high-end housing societies banging utensils and chanting ‘go Corona go’ in a frenzied zeal.Five years later, Homebound makes us pause and look back at this time through the prism of Ghaywan’s exquisite storytelling, rooted in reality, sharp and angular without any hyperbole.Unlike the ostentatious and glittery world of mainstream Bollywood movies, Homebound doesn’t sell a false getaway complete with a happy ending and larger-than-life (often unrealistic) plots.Its ingenuity lies in the depiction of the aspirations of underdogs and (sadly) their limits.